Tyler Gibb

I’d like to say something on the subject of picture quality.

Fuck picture quality.

Alright… Not really, really but, y’know, a little bit. Fuck it a little bit. More like who-gives-a-fuck? it.

Listen, I’m just tired. I’ve been researching video editing software and the peripherals inherent therein and it’s just terribly tedious. I so don’t care about 4:4:4 vs 4:3:3 or 4:2:2 or whatever! And I have like 20-10 vision and can paint a colour wheel by smell. Picture quality is such a scam - with the notable exception perhaps of nature documentaries…

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi was black and white with like 6 shades of grey and it was captivating; Blair Witch was total crap and it scared me silly (shut up, you loved it); and lets not forget a hundred classics and even more movies we all watched on cruddy old TVs before HD. All I’m saying is, talent trumps technology and I am so through trying to optimize every freaking pixel of screen real estate. There are ten times more codecs out there then there are colours in the entire Prismacolor and Faber-Castell pencil collections combined and - seriously - we’re going through all of this to make Transformers look good? The king isn’t wearing any clothes!

I’m done with it. The Great Big Emptiness or Refrain (like it?) or whatever the hell I’m going to call this thing is going to look like crap. I’ve decided. And you’re going to like it, damn it!

Sound quality on the other hand…

I love my brain, we’ve got a great relationship (purely platonic), because the older I get and the more I develope my production methods, the more Present-Tyler can rely on the fact that Past-Tyler’s decisions won’t upset Future-Tyler. For instance, with this real-time playback storyboard I’ve been creating entering its third week of development I’ve been getting a little impatient; begun second guessing myself… But then I remembered that Past-Tyler wouldn’t set me up to waste my time; that there must be a reason I’m spending so much pre-production on this storyboard when in all likelyhood I’ll just be making a lot of it up as I go when it comes down to shooting. Then my brain reminded me what I was up to:

See I’m illustrating storyboard frames and then lining them up in Final Cut Express to give me a real-time playback of the movie I plan on shooting. The reason I decided I needed a real-time playback version of a storyboard instead of a binder of static images is because of the music.

See The Great Big Emptiness (I am so going to change that title) has a large musical component. Not Sound of Music “musical” but musical in the sense that music will be playing a more prominent role in the movie than simply being relegated to the score. Music will actually be performed by the performers… Which raised a lot of questions in my mind about recording, editing and timing. So I decided that a playback storyboard would be helpful in figuring out a lot of that stuff before shooting. Since we (Vidya Lutchman - musician and the movie’s lead actress) need to write music that will be specific to scenes before we’ve actually shot the scenes - music in fact that will have to be performed before the camera as well as carry over other scenes like a score would - the more we know about how those scenes are going to flow the better.

Confused?

Yeah, my head hurts. But I just have to trust in whaterver moment of clarity Past-Tyler was experiencing when he send me on this errand. It’s good to have plan. I can’t stress that enough. A plan is like creating a reflex in your mind; so later when you’re in the middle of chaos you don’t have to think, you can just react.

T

What’s in a name? A lot actually, which is why it’s so troubling to me that I’m generaly pretty bad at titles (see “Minushi”*).

Anyway as I announced only a couple weeks ago - or in the parlance of our times, a couple posts ago - the new project is called The Great Big Emptines, for now. For now because - full disclosure - I’m not completely sold on the name myself. It’s a title that sums up the theme of the movie, which is an important trait in a title if you ask me but I’m not sure it has that memorable a quality. A trait that may be even more important as far as marketing is concerned. Something like Snakes on a Plane for example covers both those bases with shameless efficiency. Or take Deep Impact which is just on the tasteful side of a pun but also fills in the criteria very effectively both reflecting the physical catastrophy facing the characters as well as the emotional “impact” it is having on their lives.

One thing that tends to bother me in a title is when it’s appearence in the dialogue of the film immediately pulls me out of whatever tentative suspension of disbelief said narrative may have on me. Take for example, Gone Baby Gone. Great film, but the moment the words themselves - “She’s gone, baby. Gone.” - were spoken, then the actor speaking them may as well have turned his head, looked directly into the lens and winked. It pulls me out of the moment faster than a 555 number… And I’m a little concerned that the words “Great Big Emptiness” do appear in a line of dialogue in my new project… Albeit not so overtly.

And then there’s the out of left field titles. The out of left Cloverfield titles… Y’see what I did there? Yeah. I tend to gravitate toward that style of naming but then, I tend to gravitate to things that make my work less successful rather than more so for some reason… (See (again) a title like Minushi).

Titles… I ruminate on them for months; often coming up with nothing to better the initial placeholder I use to name the Word files.

But who needs a title until you’re ready to market the thing, right? Maybe, but things change when you want to create an open concept production to get you, the public, interested from the get-go…

So the The Great Big Emptiness… Will it stick? I’ll keep you posted. Until then I’ll continue to create the real-time storyboard I’ve been working on. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to post some of it here soon. More on that later too.

Until then!

*To be fair (to myself), I like the name “Minushi” it holds a lot of significance for me (and maybe for you too if you’ve received your copy of the DVD set) but from a marketing perspective it wasn’t the wisest choice of names…

When you get your subscription to Animation Magazine this month, check out the nod to Minushi on page 22 in the Home Entertainment section. I don’t know writer Mercedes Milligan personally but I like the way she thinks!

Now if only I could move closer to the celebrated side of that equation…

I’m giving it a name. And tentatively that name is The Great Big Emptiness.

There’ll be more soon. Lots more. But sufficed to say this week I’ve been learning about “shooting scripts” and “production schedules” - things that didn’t have much relevance in the life of a solo animator.

So what is The Great Big Emptiness? Well it’s going to be a bit of a departure from Minushi, that’s sure enough… It’s going to have music, and drama, tears and blood and music. Did I mention music?

As I said, more to come. I want to make this as transparent a process as possible so that you can come along the production journey of Emptiness. But so far that journey hasn’t really even reached the foothills. It’s little more than words on a page; and a couple camera tests… But soon.

I don’t have anything new to post this week. I like to think that’s because I’m in the midst of the proverbial calm.

I’ve been cleaning house. Both hard drives and hardwood. It’s been a chore but I feel I need this freshness around me before I plunge into the unknown.

Within a week I’ll have pulled a script out of a drawer (where it’s been for a fortnight), read it over and started redrafting it. Within a month I’ll be casting actors to perform the roles I’ve written in the script. Within a year I’ll have a new feature.

That’s the plan.

Well, that’s half the plan… More soon.

T

Not fifteen minutes ago I had a near miss involving my precious phalanges and the canines of a… Well, canine. The dog in question belongs to a neighbour of mine who I’ve always gladly stopped to talk to whenever our paths crossed. For reasons unknown (and possibly unknowable) to me, my neighbour’s dog however has disliking for me; always has. Today however, when I ran into them, my neighbour offered me a potential olive branch; a doggy treat which I could then take and offer to the pouch. This seemed like a perfect solution to years of uncomfortable encounters! I humbly offered the dog her treat. She humbly accepted. Whatever bad blood there had been between us seemed to have simply disappeared. Contented, I gave her a scratch behind the ear, said goodbye and walked away.

That’s when the bitch bit me in the ass.

My neighbour was horrified but fortunately also a responsible dog owner and he was quick with the leash. Which was nice because it meant I didn’t have to kill his dog… Which would have been my next move. Also, to my great fortune, it’s February and I was wearing my long coat which is only this side of being as heavy as kevlar, so my ass remains quite unscathed.

Now I have no intention of making this webspace a depository for the weekly banality of my life and I’m going somewhere with this so stay with me…

Dogs don’t like me. I get along great with most of the animal kingdom but it seems that man’s best friend is no friend of mine. Blame it on pheromones, maybe it’s my hirsuteness, whatever. I’m tired of trying to rectify things when I seem to be the only one who’s making any effort, which brings me to my point:

You can’t please everybody. Some people just won’t get your work. They just won’t get you. In fact they may even take an instant disliking to you before you even have a chance to prove yourself. What you’ve got to remember is that this has nothing to do with you (and I mean the collective “you” - I’m really talking about myself here). There are any number of reasons why somebody just may not like you and as an artist you can’t take that personally. Any equivalency of the phrase “It’s just not for us,” exists as a reminder of this. Taste is subjective and nothing’s personal.

As for me and the bitch who bit my ass, I’m not sure what I did in another life to deserve that, but in the next one I’m coming back as a flea.